Finding the "hyper-local" (or real) world in the digital one

PaidContent just put out its list of the top 50 digital media companies in the US. They base this on actual digital sales, either advertising or subscriptions or of content - with no numbers from traditional media sales (like printed magazines) and nothing from device sales, such as the iPad or Kindle.

The top spot goes to Google, of course, with more than three times the revenue of number two Yahoo. Spots three and four go to Apple and Microsoft.

Yawn. Pretty predictable, right?

Well, the list gets more interesting further down. This is PaidContent's take:

Businesses that generate digital revenue by selling ads dominate our list; companies that make most of their money selling online content or subscriptions took only 13 of the 50 spots. And while many traditional media companies may be struggling to grow their overall sales, they are generating significant revenue online. Twenty-one companies on our list have a substantial presence in non-online media, such as newspapers, phone books or TV.

Fair enough, but what struck me in the list is the prevalence of old-school, basic functions like Yellow Pages, hyper-local classifieds and sites focused on small businesses. In other words, this list was not all about the new fancy digital world (though that is there) but also about what makes our daily lives run in our immediate neighborhoods.

A digital Rotary Club, so to speak.

You've got three yellow page businesses on the list - AT&T (with YP.com and its 23 million monthly page views), SuperMedia (home of Superpages.com, among others) and the Yell Group (home of Yellowbook.com). And while AT&T obviously has other digital interests, the company entry on the PaidContent list deals almost exclusively with its printed directory business.

What do these old school print directory companies have that newer players lack? A big local sales force, it seems.

On another front, you've got ReachLocal, which offers marketing services to small businesses, and there is Classified Ventures, which runs the very local-focused cars.com and apartments.com, among others.

And one of the digital companies with the most buzz and fastest-growing influence right now is also hyper-local. Yelp.com allows people to review and rate local businesses and didn't even make the PaidContent list.

And to stretch this a bit, both Yahoo and Aol are making significant commitments to hyper-local news. Groupon is also decidedly local, as is, in the end, much of Google's advertising.

(An aside - local restaurant owners apparently are not in love with either Groupon or Yelp. Read this press release to find out why. I can't tell if they have a point or are just whining because their competitive world just got a bit more ... competitive.)

The lesson here? That the digital world is based in the real world. That our basic needs for information are not changing completely. That there is a lot of money to be made out there away from the glamour Facebook and Zynga.

Nathan Hegedus is a writer and editor for JG Communication, with a focus on magazines, white papers and corporate responsibility.

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Corporate responsibility reports: does anyone care? (I say yes)

How important are corporate responsibility reports? Does anyone read them? Do the right people read them, meaning, in a business sense, investors?

Or all they mostly for PR or to mollify a restless employee base?

Over The Guardian's The Sustainable Business Blog, Rory Sullivan makes a very convincing case that investors do not care about corporate responsibility reports, that they remain hyper-focused on the bottom line, not on the environmental or social impacts of their investments.

In other words, every environmentalist's worst nightmare.

But then, at the end, Sullivan turns a corner. This might be the business world today, he says. But the business world tomorrow will be different:

There is a growing consensus among investors that the production of a corporate responsibility report is effectively a minimum requirement for companies seeking to demonstrate that their social and environmental issues are being effectively managed.

The non-publication of a report, or the absence of published policies, targets and performance data, is increasingly likely to be taken as evidence that the company does not recognise social and environmental issues as management priorities, thereby raising wider questions about the quality of the company's risk management systems and processes.

Here at JG we have produced a series of corporate responsibility reports for various clients. So, obviously, I'm only writing about this on the company blog because I agree with Sullivan.

And I do really, really agree.

Right now, consumer companies are already judged by their perceived commitment to sustainability or corporate responsibility issues. And this trend will soon seep into the rest of the business world for what I see as two reasons.

The first is that poor communication on corporate responsibility will be bad business, as Sullivan says. But, also, to rip off a line from a presentation I saw recently, companies do not do business with companies. Instead, people at companies do business with people at other companies.

And people care about the environment now. They care about sustainability (at least here in Sweden). So even if it is subtle, a passive approach to environmental or corporate responsibility - meaning no one knows what you do if you have no report - will leave behind a bad taste, or the least, mean a missed chance for enthusiasm ... and sales.




Nathan Hegedus


Andra bloggar om: kommunikation, företagskommunikation

Varumärkets olidliga lätthet, del 2

Det finns ett nyckelbegrepp inom varumärkesarbete som ofta feltolkas: Building the brand inside (Att bygga varumärket internt). För många betyder detta enbart att en framgångsrik implementering av varumärket måste börja internt, med medarbetarna. De har inga problem med att själva konceptet kring varumärket har formulerats utifrån. Men vad Building the brand inside egentligen betyder är att varumärket måste ha sina rötter inom organisationen. Eller för att uttrycka det mer rakt på sak: Varumärket är förkroppsligandet av alla de människor som är organisationen. Och om dessa känner att varumärket inte fungerar på det sättet så spelar det inte någon roll om man utser "ambassadörer" eller liknande, det kommer inte få dem att omfatta varumärket, än mindre leva det.

Efter min första post i den här serien kommenterade bl. a Micco Grönholm (mannen bakom bloggen The Brand Man som jag verkligen rekommenderar) så här "I slutändan är det trots allt (i de flesta fall) företagets beteende - produkt och personal - inte dess kommunikation - reklam, webb, pr, etc. - som avgör hur varmärket uppfattas." Hans ord understryker precis det jag försöker säga, och skiner dessutom ett mycket avslöjande sken på de varumärken som inte utgår företagets själ och kultur.

Vad jag försöker säga är detta: Om ditt företag är en supertanker så kommer du att få stora problem om du försöker bygga ett varumärke på att ni är en lyxyacht. För det första kommer ni inte att kunna leva upp till era kunders förväntningar. Men, minst lika viktigt, dina medarbetare kommer att vara vilsna och besvikna. En majoritet av dem har troligen börjat arbeta hos er just därför att ni är en supertanker. De har en utbildning som passar profilen supertanker, de håller med om och accepterar kulturen och de outtalade värderingarna som finns kring att arbeta på en supertanker. Om du då kommer och talar om för dem att inget av detta betyder något som kommer en del att gå därifrån, några kommer att protestera och en stor, tyst majoritet kommer att knoga på men lägga sina lojaliteter och sitt engagemang utanför företaget. Och ur den likgiltigheten skapas inga starka varumärken eller en serviceanda som ger kundlojalitet.

Varje varumärke måste ta sitt avstamp i vad företaget gör och vilka medarbetarna är. Och detta betyder att du måste känna till vilka värderingar dina medarbetare har, vad de tror på och värdesätter, vad de älskar och vad de avskyr, och ta med det i beräkningarna när du slår fast vad varumärket ska stå för. Om du inte gör det kommer ditt varumärke att sakna den starka kärna som alla uthålliga varumärken måste ha.

/Pontus

Pontus Staunstrup är senior kommunikationsstrateg på JG Communication, och arbetar främst som rådgivare i kommunikationsstrategi samt med PR, webbstrategi och sociala medier. Han undervisar även i bl.a medierelationer och kommunikationsstrategi.

JG Communication är Sveriges största och, tycker vi, ledande kommunikationsbyrå. Vi hjälper våra kunder att skapa relevanta konversationer med de som betyder mest för dem. Vi gör det genom att använda de verktyg som betyder mest för oss, ord, ljud och bild.

Andra bloggar om: kommunikation, företagskommunikation

Churnalism and the complicated marriage between journalism and PR

I used to be on Oprah. Well, it was a media training where the training leader pretended to be Oprah and "interview" me about how a "real" journalist thought and worked.

And my core message?

Press releases do not work. As a newspaper reporter, I hated press releases. I threw away press releases. I did not trust press releases.

Move away from the press release, I advised. Yes, it might get you a brief in a publication if they need to fill a hole or if a reporter is especially lazy or overworked or desperate.

Except, ummm, it seems that I was just a little bit ... wrong.

A colleague just sent me a bunch of links on "churnalism," or the art of cutting and pasting directly from a press release into a news story.

The terms comes from the 2008 book Flat Earth News by British journalist Nick Davies. And it picked up serious stream recently when the Media Standards Trust foundation in the UK recently launched churnalism.com. At this website, you can paste in a press release and see if there any stories in the mainstream British print press based on it and see what percentage of the release was directly cut and pasted into the story.

Digression -- This is a brilliant idea, but the site itself is limited to the UK and to mainstream media, not the trade or tech press. I spent a frustrating half an hour yesterday plugging in English-language press releases from Sweden or from tech companies in the US with no hits.

In fact, churnalism.com highlights an important global communications issue but does come from a very UK-focused place. My gut tells me that larger mainstream US newspapers are not as likely to practice churnalism, but that trade or tech blogs in the US are more likely to cut and paste a press release, which is probably a big enough market for churnalism practitioners to thrive in. Not better than the UK, just different.

Back to the story -- To publicize the website, the Media Standards Trust had independent filmmaker Chris Atkins pull a series of hoaxes on unsuspecting news desks across the UK. Atkins got fake stories on a male beauty product called the penazzle, "chastity" garters, and the British prime minister's cat in a whole series of newspapers and radio outlets.

Then, in cooperation with Atkins, The Guardian in the UK exposed the hocus pocus of churnalism.


Embarrassing? Oh, yes.

In a PRWeek story, many PR execs dismissed the new site.

‘I’m not sure why anyone would want to go to the time and effort of producing a website to prove something that no-one really cares about,’ said Mark Stringer, founder of Pretty Green. ‘The fact is that good PROs know what journalists want and, in the main, write good press releases to help provide content for them.

Now, I still consider myself a journalist but I also mostly work in communications for corporate clients these days. So I see both sides of this. And I do believe there is a happy medium between the PR industry and journalists.

From a PR point of view, there is becoming a trusted source for trusted journalists who are not so lazy as to practice churnalism. There is taking the bad with the good and building credibility through honesty and openness. And this gets you more than the flash churnalism on the front page of a website for a day or two or the churnalism of your product filling up the briefs column that almost nobody might read.

Bypassing the quick and easy for building long-term relationships will almost always get you the big stories and the better brand building.

In a comment on the PRWeek story, Keith Trivitt, the associate director of public relations for the Public Relations Society of America, summed it up nicely:

The fact is that PR pros' value largely derives from their credibility with the media, their clients and the public that consumes the news ... [But] journalists, too, have a significant role to play in due diligence to ensure the articles they write include considerable third-party validation from sources other than those given to them by PR pros.

Perhaps, more than anything else, Churnalism.com will cause both PR pros and journalists to look at our collective work and see whether we are truly helping to expand society's collective knowledge.

If not, what can and should we be doing to fix that?

Nathan Hegedus


Andra bloggar om: kommunikation, företagskommunikation

Apps, the mobile web and the battle between platform and content

I was sitting in a meeting last week when someone said that "apps" were over. Done. Like as in so 2010. It's all about the mobile web, they said.

This really shook me. I mean, I still have a "feature phone," which means a relic, totally useless for data and not even with a nice pad for texting. I also do not own a tablet. So I haven't even started with apps yet (though I was all excited to someday go to an app store and have my mind just totally blown, man).

And now they're over?!?

Well, yes. According to VentureBeat and The Telegraph in the UK, apps are really over. From the Real Story Group:

But more importantly, mobile devices are a very volatile market. Even if you'd have the money to waste on building four different apps for the most important platforms, you may be hopelessly behind in a year's time. If the new Windows Phone 7 or MeeGo make a surge, what will you do? Ask for the budget to create even more apps? And if existing platforms start coming out in new form factors, will you update each one to make use of tablet resolutions? Do you really want to tie your mobile presence to something this fickle?

And it makes sense too. Why develop an "app" for eight different smartphone or tablet operating systems when you can just have a good mobile website for all?

Yeah, I always thought apps were stupid. Really. I have been thrilled to have that feature phone so I didn't have to deal with them.

But, really, what this highlighted to me was how muddled and shifting the balance between content, form and technology truly is right now.

I wrote a story late last year, in which Lucy Kueng, a media management expert, said that content dominates. The technology follows:

Very few people buy technology per se; they buy it because of what the technology can do for them. And they buy technology they don't particularly like if it allows them to access certain content. Thus the most compelling content is becoming ever more strategic and expensive ...

But - and here I get fuzzy and am just throwing ideas out here - isn't the platform driving the content at least to some degree? Paul Carr at TechChrunch argues that the web is nothing but an effective advertising platform, and that content on it is destined - shaped by the platform - to be driven to the lowest common denominator.

The truth is that the grand idea of the web as a content platform has failed. To make money on a web it’s all about grabbing more and more eyeballs to compensate for plummeting CPMs. On that web there’s no place for quality, and in five years time we’ll see the medium for what it really is: a brilliant advertising platform, and very little else.

And then - and I had to go here, yes - we come to Charlie Sheen and the train wreck of his recent life and media appearances.

Well, Charlie got himself on the Ustream video streaming platform the other night for his own talk show - Sheen's Korner. The host of the American version of Survivor tweeted that "the future of television is happening now," according to PaidContent. And perhaps hosted streaming is the future, where celebrities and entertainers can communicate more directly with their audiences, cutting out the middlemen of networks and studios.

But it didn't go so well for Charlie. The numbers were disappointing, he was rambling and incoherent and finally walked off the "set" on his second "show."

But what if he had been good? Would you go to a new streaming service to watch Charlie Sheen live? Is the content that important? Or will his old show, Two and a Half Men, chug on without him because it is on the right platform at the right time, regardless of quality?




Nathan Hegedus


Andra bloggar om: kommunikation, företagskommunikation

Three ways Al Jazeera is changing communication

No one knows what the future of media will look like. Are tablets and devices going to save the day for paid content? Are legacy media companies doomed? Is Facebook the new newspaper? Will Twitter bring democracy to the furthest, most repressive corners of the world?

I don't know, but I will venture a guess. Al Jazeera will be there at the end.

The Qatar-owned news network is at the center of a dizzying swirl of worldwide trends right now. Just to run down a few:

1. The role of social media in the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia has been widely debated. But whatever the actual influence is, Al Jazeera has been at the center of it.

A TechCrunch post detailed the surges of traffic to Al Jazeera outlets when former Egyptiain rule Hosni Mubarak resigned. And it turns out that during the heaviest surge, more than 70 percent of Al Jazeera's web traffic came as referrals from social media. And where did most of the referrals come from? Not Facebook, but Twitter. This is interesting because I've read that Facebook was the big driver for local organizers in Tunisia, not Twitter. But for Western news consumers, Twitter seems to be in the vanguard.

2. And Al Jazeera may also revolutionize the moribund US news biz. Demand is sky high for Al Jazeera English - even though it is available in only 3 million homes in the US. But people are finding it through its website, through YouTube and through set-top boxes like Roku. From the Guardian:

The Qatar-based channel's acclaimed coverage of the Egyptian crisis has been referred to as the broadcaster's "CNN moment", doing for al-Jazeera English what the first Gulf war did for CNN, pushing it to the forefront of the public's consciousness. Put simply, must-see TV. Now the challenge is to translate the plaudits into the major cable or satellite distribution deal the channel has long sought without success in the US ...

With China investing $7bn in foreign language media, we may also be witnessing the beginning of a shift, albeit slight, in the nature of global TV news and debate.

In a landscape dominated by partisan talk - see Fox News (right) and MSNBC (left-ish) - and with CNN seen as largely ineffective, Al Jazeera seems to be finding the strongest niche of all - the good reporting, hard news niche.

That this is happening in a country that demonized Al Jazeera during the Iraq War, in which its public perception was that of terrorist accomplice, is really something. It either speaks to changing American attitudes or a serious void in the American media scene.

3. There is another component to Twitter and Al Jazeera - the English one. As English becomes more and more widely spoken, it provides a larger platform for a tweet from Tunisia or a news outlet from the Middle East. I discovered this in a comment by statica from another Guardian piece:

How much more powerfully would international support for the protests in Tianamen Square, those crying for help in Rwanda or Sarajevo, have been raised if individuals around the world could have had access to specific images & statements put out by people on the inside?

I guess we're finding that out now.

Much of this is relevant to us here as communicators in Sweden. The English bit. The global platform (opportunity for people up in the far north). The role of technology and news in ordering our societies.

I wonder what more we will find out tomorrow. No matter what it is, we'll probably see it on Al Jazeera.




Nathan Hegedus


Andra bloggar om: kommunikation, företagskommunikation